Network service providers are expected to provide differentiated levels of service according to service level agreements (SLAs). Currently, SLA verification measures latency, including jitter and delay, by using an out-of-band mechanism and sending synthetic probe packets that are independent of production data flows. While an effort is made to resemble production traffic, such as voice or video, an actual path that the production traffic takes, based on hashing, could differ from a path of out-of-band traffic. Latency could be related to a characteristic of a specific flow, a specific path, a specific size, etc., which may not be detected by an out-of-band probe packet. Consequently, during SLA verification, an exact service level achieved by a specific user may not be determined.
Network analytics is a key area for monetization of a network. For example, the NetFlow™ technology is used for collecting network and flow related information, which is periodically uploaded to a network management server for analytics. The analytics may be used for real-time service assurance. Federating such distributed data in order to perform real-time and predictive service assurance is difficult to achieve on a per-flow basis. For ease and scalability, real-time and predictive service assurance checks for any resource constraints, and if a predefined threshold is breached, a link/path will be excluded. However, per-flow visibility is not possible.